July 7, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Sick racist culture on the screen
This capitalist system in the U.S. has no future for millions of Black and Latino youth—that is, no “viable” way to exploit them. In this situation, a “New Jim Crow” has arisen, featuring a drumbeat of demonization, a relentless school-to-prison pipeline, pervasive police harassment and brutality, and massive systematic incarceration of Black and Latino people. This New Jim Crow has a logic: the logic of genocide, which is the extermination of a whole people. Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network, has described what we have now as a slow genocide that could turn into a fast genocide. Stigmatization... containment... extermination. This has happened before. And this must be STOPPED. The following is a regular feature showing just some of what goes on week-in, week-out in this offensive by the system.
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From a reader:
This weekend, the new film The Heat is opening in theaters across the country. This is being called a “feminist” film because it’s two women in the style of male-buddy cop movies. The commercial—being played all over TV—shows these two cops hanging a young Black man out of a window... and then dropping him onto a car. This is supposed to be a laugh moment, “ha, ha, the cops went a little far with the ‘criminal.’” But just think about it—we are in the midst of the trial of George Zimmerman, a racist vigilante who murdered Trayvon Martin, a young Black man, because Zimmerman viewed him as a dangerous suspect. We are in a situation where more Black people are imprisoned than were held in slave chains in this country before the Civil War... where millions of people's lives are torn apart by the New Jim Crow of mass incarceration... and where thousands and thousands of people’s lives are cut short by the murderous police. THIS SHIT IS NOT FUCKING FUNNY. To laugh about the all-too-real and truly genocidal brutality that Black people face is an outrage, and it is part of promoting the kind of callous white supremacy that has been a part of America since day one and is apparent in society today everywhere you turn.
On top of that, to say that because two women are doing it is empowering—this is just sick. This is nothing but contributing to a racist culture that goes along with the criminalization of now generations of Black and Latino youth. And just because women can do it too doesn't make it any less oppressive.
This—and the millions of ways this racist culture is promoted—needs to be called out and resisted.
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